Every American should support a woman’s right to choose . . . whether or not to pay union dues. The Supreme Court will decide by late June whether women and men who belong to government-employee unions will enjoy this fundamental right as born-free U.S. citizens.

In the 1988 Beck v. Communications Workers of America case, the Supremes held that private-sector-union employees could demand refunds on those portions of their dues that underwrote activities beyond collective bargaining, especially cash spent on political candidates and causes with which employees might disagree. The guiding principle here was expressed with characteristic eloquence by Thomas Jefferson: “To compel a man to furnish funds for the propagation of ideas he disbelieves and abhors is sinful and tyrannical.”

Advertisement

Private-sector unions can claim a distinction between their private-sector activity — namely negotiating over wages and benefits with private employees — and their public activity, which is namely shipping cash to campaigns. And, in the 2012 elections, 91 percent of that money went to the Democratic party and its contenders, and only 9 percent to the GOP, according to OpenSecrets.org.

However, with government workers’ unions, this distinction does not exist. Everything they do is in the public sector and, thus, political. Whether or not a teachers’ union ships a huge chunk of its dues to Hillary Clinton’s campaign, it engages in politics the very second its labor bosses ask the local school board for, say, higher salaries, more vacation days, prohibitions on merit pay, and limits on charter schools. These are all hotly debated political questions that directly affect taxpayers, for good or ill.

So sending any money to a government-employees’ union — not just its PAC — funds political activity. If a government worker wants such funds withdrawn from his paycheck before he sees it, fine. However, another worker should not be forced to subsidize this inescapable government-union politicking if she objects.

And Rebecca Friedrichs objects.

Advertisement

“This is important to me because I pay for collective-bargaining stances that the union takes, and I disagree with them,” the Golden State instructor and lead plaintiff in Friedrichs v. California Teachers Association told Fox News Channel’s Shannon Bream on Sunday. “This union was voted in when I was a child. I have no vote as a fee payer. So, really, these unions are not speaking on my behalf. They are speaking on behalf of the union and the union leadership.”

For this reason, Friedrich’s claim is much more than a matter of mere labor law. Her attorneys told the Court on Monday that she has a basic human right under the Constitution’s First Amendment not to subsidize the political speech of union bosses who demand that public officials implement policies that Friedrichs rejects.

#share#Friedrichs makes labor bosses quake in their loafers.

“So the 35 million people that used to have collective organization is [sic] now down to 16 million,” Service Employees International Union president Mary Beth Henry said last Thursday on a podcast hosted by former Obama consigliere David Axelrod. “By next summer we’re going to lose another two million because of a Supreme Court case.”

Patrick Semmens of the National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation urges Henry to put on a happy face.

“Unions shouldn’t fear voluntary dues if they really do as good of a job as they claim, and it’s why we’ve argued Right to Work is good for unions, because it makes them more accountable to rank-and-file workers,” he tells me. “A union that effectively represents its members doesn’t need compulsory dues, and a union that is ineffective and unresponsive to its members doesn’t deserve to be propped up with mandatory dues.”

Indeed, unions should welcome a Supreme Court ruling that makes dues voluntary. After all, if SEIU, the National Education Association, AFL-CIO, and other unions are delivering as much good as they claim, workers should be thrilled to keep paying their dues. If labor bosses and their union stooges in government worry that workers will halt their fees at the first possible moment, then they are confessing that unions just aren’t worth it.

If labor chiefs argue that their workers will try to enjoy everything that unions do for them, but not buy those services, then the union bosses are calling their members deadbeats who want something for nothing — literally.

People like SEIU’s Mary Beth Henry, the NEA’s Randi Weingarten, and the AFL-CIO’s Richard Trumka would be ill-advised to send that message, especially if they then need to ask workers politely for dues, rather than vacuum them out of their pay packets every fortnight, as they largely do today.

Big Labor is the only industry that enjoys this absurd special privilege. Imagine if United Airlines feasted on mandatory ticket sales. What if everyone in, say, California, Colorado, Illinois, and New York had no right to choose whether or not to buy their plane tickets from United? Without competition, guess how friendly the skies would be.

Advertisement

#related#Instead, United, American, JetBlue, Southwest, and other airlines persuade people to hand them money voluntarily for valuable services rendered. Unions should be worthy and confident enough to do the same.

In this connection, it is interesting to note Americans’ overwhelming rejection of forced unionism. An August 2014 Gallup survey found that 71 percent of Americans would vote for a Right to Work law to make union membership voluntary. In fact, 65 percent of Democrats, 71 percent of Republicans, and 77 percent of independents support the Right to Work.

Most Popular

The news that FBI deputy director Andrew McCabe was fired hours before qualifying for retirement with full benefits somehow grew over the weekend into a false impression that the career FBI agent was stripped of his pension altogether.
[jwplayer GlHOavPa-wKJ9CRQU]
Members of the media remarked that McCabe ...
Read More

Representative Adam Schiff (D., Calif.) bucked his party on President Trump's firing of FBI deputy director Andrew McCabe, remarking that his dismissal may have been "justified."
“You know, his firing may be justified,” the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee said on ABC’s This Week. ...
Read More

Labels multiply in supermarkets faster than salmonella at a convenience-store sushi bar. It’s important to keep up; we should all be well-informed eaters. But the onslaught of clean food, natural products, sustainably produced, gluten free, butterflies everywhere, and GMO-free sea salt are just too much. The ...
Read More

It can be hard to keep one’s wits about oneself during the Age of Trump. Our president is like the ringmaster of a circus, and the American people are his enthralled spectators. It seems as if we cannot get enough. Love him or hate him, he remains at the center of our public consciousness.
It is hard to ...
Read More

The “free college” movement, fueled to a large degree by Bernie Sanders during his 2016 presidential bid, is a response to concerns about increasing college-tuition rates, concomitant stagnation in state and federal grants, and a corresponding student-loan debt load that has ballooned to roughly $1.4 ...
Read More

The use of assassination raises two difficult sets of questions.
First: Is it effective? Can the elimination of an individual significantly change the course of history? Make the world a safer place? Save the lives of other human beings?
Second: Is it morally and legally justified? Is it ethically and ...
Read More

An unforced error from a Vatican communications office the other day drove me a little something like crazy. The nature of the unforced error is that it is wholly unnecessary and typically distracting. And so it was.
Days before, as the fifth anniversary of Pope Francis’s election as pope was approaching, a ...
Read More

Of all the abrupt comings and goings in this administration, the dismissal of Rex Tillerson is undoubtedly the most important — maybe one of the most important firings since Harry Truman fired Douglas MacArthur during the Korean War.
By dismissing MacArthur, Truman drew a firm line between military and ...
Read More

‘I’ve had a lot of bad ideas in my life,” former U.N. ambassador Samantha Power tells Politico. “Though none as immortalized as that one.”
Wow. It’s a major concession. And what might “that one” be?
Not standing idly by in the White House while Iranians protested a fixed election in 2009, then ...
Read More